A 3 Step Guide to Creating Interactive Learning Environments

An Interactive Learning Environment (ILE) can create better learning opportunities and improve the education experience when applied. In this article, we'll go over the benefits of having an interactive environment and provide tips on how you can create one in your own classroom. In the end, we'll discuss three ways to make sure students know who did what and make them want to participate.

1. Create a Community

•  Focus on the audience. Who are your students? What do they want to learn? How can you teach them what they need to know?
• Use an interactive environment that encourages participation with lots of feedback for each student, whether checking their understanding or having them explain what they understand.
• Create a safe environment that promotes critical thinking and risk-taking — instead of encouraging fear or embarrassment.

2. Promote Discussion and Feedback Instead of Lectures and Information Dumping

• Build the class around activities that allow for student participation rather than prescribed lectures aimed at passive learning.
• Invite students to explain what they understand after asking a question, which engages them in the material and helps them learn from their mistakes.
• Be open to feedback; it will help you make necessary changes to your teaching style and give students greater control over how they absorb information.

3. Give Students a Sense of Responsibility and Ownership Over Their Learning

• Initiate a collaborative atmosphere where students take an active role in their education instead of waiting to be spoon-fed the information by the teacher. Allow them to work together as well as independently.
• Make sure that you enable student input and that you take into consideration all suggestions and ideas.
• Build a community where students are inspired to ask questions and interact with each other, encouraging participation. Those who may be too shy to speak up in a traditional setting can have the opportunity to learn from their peers in an interactive environment.

Creating Engaging Online Courses for Data Science Students

Jupyter Notebooks and Interactive Learning Environments and the Benefits Thereof…

Data science is all about exploring data from an object, conducting statistical analyses, and then being able to summarize the results in a meaningful way. Jupyter notebooks can help students perform these processes easier because they can keep everything in one document rather than switching between several documents. 

IllumiDesk is an interactive environment that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and explanatory text. Jupyter notebooks can incorporate markdown elements, allowing you to easily create readable reports that include equations and rich media.

Auto-grading tools pair with Jupyter notebooks to make grading homework assignments easier for teachers and students. Such tools can also help students identify where they need to improve and help them practice answering questions like those they will be asked on the actual exam.

With IllumiDesk, you can make grading less time-consuming for teachers, who can use it to set auto-grader tests. This way, students will know which problems they need to focus on before the actual exam.

Conclusion

Every year, teachers worldwide struggle with a problem: How can we engage our students and make them stay motivated? It's a common dilemma, but it doesn't have to be that way. Instead of trying to find new ways to entertain your class, why not make learning itself more interesting by turning your classroom into an interactive environment?

References and further reading recommendations

Maxwell, D., Meyer, S. and Bolch, C.A. (2021) “DataStory^TM: an interactive sequential art approach for data science and artificial intelligence learning experiences,” Innovation and Education, 3(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s42862-021-00015-x.